Dark Palace (48 page)

She ordered the staff to begin hiring lorries and buses to take the archives and staff, and to book seats on the trains.

A general meeting was called of Aghnides, Lester and the remaining Heads of Sections.

During the meeting more news came by messenger and was shared among those at the meeting. News came of a Swiss general mobilisation. German forces were manoeuvring on Lake Constance.

The message said that Swiss refugees were arriving from Basle and Zurich. The
bourse
had closed and there were queues at the banks.

It began to seem clear that the invasion of Switzerland was imminent.

Walters, Loveday and Wilson were excused from the meeting to allow them to arrange for the immediate evacuation of their families.

After they had left the meeting, Avenol abused them to the others. ‘We French have more discipline. French families suffer their fate together.'

Those remaining were stunned by the outburst.

She thought it was aimed also at Lester and she saw him chafing under the remarks.

Surprisingly, no one, not even Lester, protested at Avenol's remarks. Respect for his office still restrained them publicly.

Those who remained seemed unwilling to leave the meeting, as if being together was something of an action in itself. It was also the place to be if one was to know what was happening.

Gerty knocked on the door, but this time did not have a telegraph or message to hand over. Instead she reported that resignations had begun coming in by internal messengers from junior staff throughout the Palais.

‘We no longer have time to read and authorise these,' she said.

Messages came from the Permanent Delegates who wanted to know if accommodation was to be provided for them in France and were they too to be evacuated along with the Secretariat?

Avenol had no answer.

He looked at her. She said, ‘We had trouble finding accommodation for the Secretariat. No accommodation was booked for the Permanent Delegates.'

The meeting was finally closed and everyone went about their business. What business? What business was worth doing now?

She went about preparing for the evacuation. Even if she were a watchdog in Avenol's office, she was still an officer with duties. She was working normally, albeit in circumstances she had never before experienced. Her day was still made up of documents to be drafted and typed, telephone calls to be booked and made, cables to be sent and petty cash to be accounted.

Next day, she told Avenol that the remaining staff wanted to have a wireless set in the Library so that they could follow events.

After half a day of consideration, he agreed.

There were rumblings of complaint among the staff about
being asked to move from relatively safe neutral ground in Switzerland to France, a belligerent country.

Meanwhile, Germany drove deeper into Belgium and Holland.

She was taking shorthand from Avenol when a special announcement was foreshadowed on the wireless set kept on during the day at low volume in his office.

‘Turn up the volume,' he said, agitated.

They heard some of the ‘Marseillaise' and then an urgent-voiced French military attaché read a message from the President of France stating that as of four o'clock that morning France had been invaded.

Avenol began to tap his fingers on the desk.

He asked her to leave him.

He then called her back and beckoned for her to sit. She sat while he booked calls to his relatives in France with the wireless in the background. She offered to do it for him but he seemed to need the activity.

As he booked the calls and as the calls came back, having been given official priority, he would mutter to her personal details about the particular relative to whom he was speaking, classifying them according to their
courage
or their
poltronnerie
.

All over Europe people were trying to telephone to warn, to calm, to reassure, to plan.

His hands were now shaking and his voice was strained as he gave out advice and listened to information.

From time to time there would be a knock on his door and she would answer it, shielding him from callers.

He then asked her to call Securitas and hire an additional personal bodyguard for him.

‘It will be where the Germans are stopped,' he said. ‘This is the moment of truth for the Germans. The French and the British armies will bring them to their demise.'

‘I am sure they will be stopped.'

As they were both leaving that evening, he told her that during the night he would be contactable at an address across the Swiss border in France, which he gave to her. ‘I fear that if I sleep at my home I could be kidnapped by German agents.'

He had made these arrangements himself. Was it a sign that he did not trust her?

She gave no hint that she thought the change of address was strange. She saw him as a man straining to be the administrator of a great international organisation which he had somehow both to protect and at the same time to also dismantle, while his own nation fought a war for its survival, and his friends and relatives were sucked into the war zone.

Avenol was a man bending in a gale.

She felt for him. She was perhaps swinging to his side. She did not want to be false to him. For all his stiff posing, she did not want to deceive him.

She damned the others for having put her in this position. She would've rather given herself whole-heartedly to the protecting of the organisation, to the whole question of what was to be done as the world fell apart.

And as a woman working with a man under huge and unique pressure, she could no longer deny that she was forming sentiments of attachment, the special bond of the office.

At first, when she'd changed offices, her daily close contact with Avenol had made her feel as if she were being unfaithful to Bartou. She had been changing partners in a vocational marriage.

Or, more accurately, becoming bigamous.

With Avenol, she was in part playing the office wife in a very faint and restrained way, but because of the peculiar plot which lay behind her presence there, she was also at the same time being unfaithful to him.

She could not now fully involve herself in the pleasures of
either role—that of the clever confidence trickster or that of virtuous subordinate which came from professional fidelity and from the special restrained intimacy created within such an office.

That night, she and Ambrose had a personal emergency meeting at the Molly.

‘I am loading trucks tomorrow,' she told Ambrose.

‘So the move is on.'

‘I'll have to go with the others to France.'

‘France will probably fall,' he said. ‘The Americans are not coming to help. Bloodlines do not seem to be working.'

‘Won't it be more like the first War—trenches and years of fighting?'

‘That's not what they're saying. It's all
blitzkrieg
. Tanks. Rapid movement. No trenches.'

‘The French have tanks.'

‘They do.'

‘And what should we do then?'

‘What do you want to do?'

‘Loveday and Walters are getting out, it seems. Wilson is going to England, and then probably back to New Zealand—if he can get a boat.'

‘Heard from Robert? He might know what's happening.'

‘Nothing.'

She didn't know where he was.

‘Sit tight is perhaps the policy for the moment. What is your favourite saying these days—“We will wait upon the turn of events in hope of advantage”?'

‘You will sit tight, with me? I think you should come to France.'

‘Of course.'

‘Call Bernard over—I must keep him up-to-date on events. Although he seems always to be ahead of us.'

She took her apron and work gloves to the office, plus others for those staff who might not have thought of them.

She helped select and then supervise the loading of archives into the lorries, glad of the physical work.

She sent off the first convoy.

Avenol visited the Permanent Delegates from the Latin American countries—who seemed to be about the only ones around—and asked them to take into their custody some of the other archives.

Towards lunchtime, she received a hand-written instruction from Avenol to stop the removal of the archives and to recall the lorries already dispatched.

The instruction said that the Swiss government had reversed its position. ‘It now fears that for the League to leave will create panic among their citizens who will also try to flee.'

Ye gods, the Swiss government was in panic.

She went to his office for further clarification.

As she stood there in her apron and gloves, they both laughed at the Swiss reasoning and from a certain relief.

‘Recall the archives from France. Unbook the accommodation,' he said.

He even placed a comradely hand briefly on her arm.

That evening at the Molly Club, she told Ambrose, Bernard and a couple of others that Avenol had inquired about whether she was kitted-out to walk from Switzerland back to Australia.

She told them that the Staff Committee had advised those who still remained not to buy new walking shoes. For walking of long distances, it was important to have shoes which were walked-in.

Ambrose said he would do it in high heels.

Bernard thought high heels would be appropriate for them all. ‘Style above comfort, always,' he said.

She was also able to report that she'd heard from Robert, who'd moved to Arras along with his dreadful friends Potato Gray, Moorehead, Philby and some other reporters.

His card had said, ‘We are drinking out the now not-so-phoney war.'

She had a new fellow feeling for him in the turbulent times but she felt no desire to be in his company.

She imagined that he and his newspaper friends would now be scooting down through France, perhaps to Amiens.